I received an invite to – well, let’s just say it as it is – Google’s Facebook clone tonight. Google+ is promising, but I’m still in a stage of exploration.

I don’t have the hatred of Facebook that seems to run deep in many of the people who work in the tech world. It’s an extremely complex system, and they’ve been able to hide most of that in a fairly straightforward interface. Their Achilles’ heel is that they’ve simplified the system so much that they’ve hidden the granularity of privacy that many people (well, at least, many power users) want. There’s an incredibly extensive set of privacy controls should you care to learn how to use them, but most users won’t ever change a privacy setting, let alone build lists of friends for custom sharing.

Google has attacked this by putting their alternative metaphor for lists – Circles – front and center. It’s a smart idea, but there’s a lot left to be desired as the service stands right now. I’m going to continually update this post as I explore the system, highlighting some of the good, the bad, and the ugly in the hope that if Google+ does take off, these will all be resolved at some point. (I’m doubtful Google+ will ever be nearly as popular as Facebook, but in this case, unlike Wave and Buzz, I’m honestly not sure.)

Smart moves & great stuff

• Managing circles works incredibly well on the iPad. It’s fun, even. The animations make a tedious and boring task fun, inviting, and engaging. Love the drag and drop and the visualizations of circles.
• The overall design of the system is the best design I’ve seen from Google to date, both in layout and in usability.
• I like that you’re able to have one-way followers instead of the required double-confirm that Facebook uses.
• The notifications system is AMAZING. It’s all very functional with exactly what you want to do, all right in the nav bar. I love that it carries the notifications across Google properties, too.

Drawbacks & limitations

• Google’s biggest hurdle will be attracting people to use Google+ instead of (or in addition to) Facebook. They should make it really simple to grab friends in any way possible, but as of now they only have your Google contacts listed as well as imports from Yahoo and Hotmail. Where are imports from Facebook, Twitter, or a non-webmail address book?
• You have to use a devoted Google address to sign up. If you have a Google Apps account, you’re out of luck. My primary email address is an Apps email, but since Google Apps accounts aren’t eligible for Profiles, they are, in turn, ineligible for Google+. I can’t add my Apps address, either, because the system throws an error that the email I enter is associated with another Google account. That’s going to make it tough for people to find me. (There’s an ongoing forum thread about this issue.)
• Since the entire system is new, you’ll end up adding a lot of contacts that don’t have full profiles. That means you’ll see the default blue silhouette graphic until those people fill out their Google+ profile – if they decide to join Google+ at all. One or two of those generic images isn’t bad. But when 75% of your contacts don’t have photos, the slick visualizations for Circles don’t really help at all. Part of the appeal of Facebook is that you can see your friends at a glance (it is in the name of the site, after all).
• There’s no API. Facebook has a really robust API. Just wanted to mention that.
• Whenever you do a search in the primary search box at top, the system spawns a new window and uses a Google search style instead of a Google+ style. It’s jarring.
• It’d be helpful to be able to add circles to circles. Since circles are all about limiting what you share, there’s a pretty good chance that some of what you share will overlap. Why should you have to add a great friend to both a “BFFs” circle and a “Friends” circle?
• I think Google might run into some privacy issues of its own when people really start sharing info; since you don’t need to confirm friends, I wouldn’t be surprised if people end up sharing info publicly with the mistaken sense that it’s only being shared with those people who they’ve added to any of their circles.
• My profile URL is https://plus.google.com/u/1/113746042084088900894. I hope that shortens up a bit over time, but Google’s known for some pretty crazy URLs.

We’re just over a month into 2011, and already this year has been transformative for mobile devices. Though the mainstream media may argue that the launch of the iPhone on Verizon is the biggest story of the new year, the truth is that there’s a much broader shift taking place. It’s all about control.

Steve Jobs loves to use a quote by Alan Kay to describe the engineering philosophy at Apple:

“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”

That, famously, has been the crux of the rivalry between Apple and Microsoft on desktops. Those that don’t favor the Apple way of business point out that software isn’t portable to different hardware as it is on Windows or Linux, and if anything, Apple has tightened the integration of hardware and software on their devices over the years.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has built its computer business on partnerships with hardware makers. At the D5 conference in 2007, Bill Gates, seated next to Jobs in an interview, explained:

“The question is, are there markets where the innovation and variety you get is a net positive? … And then take the phone market. We think we’re on 140 different kinds of hardware. We think it’s beneficial to us that even if we did a few ourselves, it wouldn’t give us what we have through those partnerships.”

What a difference four years – or in this case, a week – can make.

On Wednesday, HP held a press event to unveil their latest generation of mobile devices. The new gadgets use webOS, the operating system HP company acquired with its takeover of Palm last year. Though it wasn’t really a surprise that HP would use webOS on their new devices, the choice moved HP squarely in with Apple on the list of companies that want to control both hardware and software.¹

And then there was yesterday.

In a joint statement with Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop announced that Nokia phones would use Windows Phone 7. Nokia was running out of options in the expanding smartphone market, and Symbian, their previous primary OS, wasn’t stacking up to iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7.

The politics of the deal are what make it interesting. Matt Drance writes that the Nokia/Microsoft partnership, too, may be about control. The “coup,” as Drance calls it, shows that Microsoft wants hardware control, too, even if it continues to allow other companies to develop with WP7.

The battle lines of control are being drawn. Google’s taking the Windows philosophy of the past: strength is in variety of hardware. Apple’s sticking its ground of hardware and software integration, but ten years ago who would’ve thought that HP and Microsoft would champion a similar style of control?

¹ During the event on Wednesday, HP also announced that webOS will be available on desktops and notebooks at some point in the future. The landscape continues to change.

Yesterday Facebook announced a new, unified messaging system. Over the next few months, Facebook users will be able to view messages, chats, email, and SMS messages sent to friends in a single place on Facebook’s site. In the tech world we tend to shrug off these sorts of “incremental” announcements: “Oh, Facebook’s including SMS and email. That’s nice,” we say. Sometimes it’s difficult to step back and see the larger picture.

This kind of announcement deserves our attention. This is how revolutions begin.

Change

Technology companies thrive on change. Tech allows us to explore new ways of doing things we already know how to do. But change isn’t easy.

Making changes isn’t as easy as it sounds. Users of a site or service become familiar with the way a feature works, and any change – even a minor one – can be a shock. Facebook is no stranger to shock; even when they change the subtlest of features on the site, a “bring back the old Facebook” group will pop up within hours.

It’s no surprise that many of the big innovations on the web are fueled by small startup companies that don’t have to worry about appeasing a large number of users. When a company starts from scratch, it can do whatever it likes. Startups face a different challenge; they need to convince users that their way of doing things is better. Startups often aren’t able to get a foothold in an ecosystem with much more established companies in the mix.

The best of all worlds

With their new messaging system, Facebook aims to overcome both challenges. With 250 million people using the site every day, everything they do is noticed and used religiously. At the same time the new system doesn’t change much within the current site; it adds to it. (For another example of a company that decided to add instead of change in a quest to improve, look to Apple.)

It seems like the engineers at Facebook looked at other services like Gmail and Google Wave and decided to truly overhaul the concept of messaging. They even went so far as to reconsider the structure of conversations; the new system is person-based instead of subject-based, allowing users to see a history of all conversations between two people. One of the Facebookers featured in the intro video notes that the new system reminds him of the box of letters his grandparents used to keep. Modern messaging is much more complicated, but the metaphor Facebook’s using is much closer to how conversations happen in person.

As an added bonus, the change is great for all parties involved. It allows users to better track conversations and unify their communication. It also keeps users on the site and encourages them to build their relationship within the Facebook ecosystem; that’s music to the ears of Facebook and their advertisers.

Facebook’s launching an overhaul of how we communicate with friends. This is how email, SMS, and chat is supposed to work. This is how revolutions begin.

Digital marketing is still a relatively new area of the advertising world, and many companies seem to stumble while wading (or diving head-first) into the waters. It’s actually quite rare to find a company that does it right.

Old Spice has shown that it’s one of those companies that understands the digital space. A few months ago, the company aired what became a wildly successful ad featuring Isaiah Mustafa as an over-the-top yet deadpan “manly man” to advertise its products. The quirky campaign returned in June with a follow-up ad.

While the traditional ads stand well by themselves, Old Spice’s online integration really makes the campaign shine. They’re using Twitter’s Promoted Tweets program to reach out to the social networking community. They’re sponsoring a free shipping deal over at BustedTees, a company which (perhaps not coincidentally) sells a shirt based on the Old Spice ads. But their sponsorships and paid advertising pale in comparison to the truly innovative component of the campaign.

Over the course of the last day, Mustafa has starred in a series of over a hundred reply videos on Old Spice’s YouTube channel. Each video directly addresses a comment from a user on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or Yahoo Answers, and many were shot and uploaded in just a couple of hours after the original post. The replies retain the voice and humor of the traditional ads, but the content of each is conversational; the replies cover everything from marriage proposals to commercial reenactments. (In some, the Old Spice Man uses other tweets from the commenter as fodder for his reply.)

This is digital advertising at its finest. It’s funny. It doesn’t push the product in every video (some don’t even mention Old Spice at all). It bridges the gap between traditional and digital advertising by using the same actor and character in both media. It treats both popular and lesser-known social networking users equally. And above all, it starts a conversation and generates buzz.

This is where we’re heading.

UPDATE: He/they sent roses to Alyssa Milano, playing off an exchange they’d had earlier in the day. Awesome.

With last week’s iPad announcement, Apple hopes to start a technology revolution. Again. They nudged the smartphone market into the future with the release of the iPhone. Just a couple of years later, many of the over 140,000 iPhone applications available for download or purchase have pushed mobile development to new heights.

Now developers have a new platform to test their experiments. But while the iPhone ushered in a wave of applications geared around portability and location, the iPad will likely drive developers to create completely new user experiences.

The iPad offers developers a blank 9.7-inch canvas on which they can develop any interface they choose – with the added benefit of multi-touch, positioning sensors, and more. While tablets are not a new concept, they’ve always been built atop the recognized interface and conventions of a traditional computer. Users expect a certain experience with these sorts of applications; if it doesn’t feel familiar, there’s often resistance.

On a new form factor like the iPad, the resistance to change almost completely disappears. The iPad is a new experience from the start and lacks the complex interface of normal computers, allowing developers to spend less time focusing on what people expect and more time focusing on what is natural.

Developers around the world have a new, intuitive interface for applications. Expect to see some true innovation for the iPad over the next few months.

On every summer trip I take to Boston, I always try to make some time to walk around Quincy Market. On a clear day several street performers will be stationed at various spots around the historic market demonstrating a talent or performing some sort of act. Some attract a few tourists as they walk past. The seasoned performers can build a crowd of hundreds within a few minutes.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these street performers lately and how an online crowd can build just as quickly. Like the audiences gathering outside Quincy Market, these online crowds often share an interest or purpose. Most of the people in the crowd have never met – and most will never see each other again.

This morning, one such crowd of people across the globe formed around a common event: a temporary glitch in Google’s search results pages. Hundreds of Twitter users reported their experience in an effort to determine the scope of the problem.

And while it’s widely known that famous Twitterers can garner follower crowds of thousands on the microblogging site, there was no better example of the speed of crowd formation than when Soleil Moon Frye, an actress best known for the title role in the TV series Punky Brewster, began to tweet. Within 24 hours of her first tweet, more than 3,000 people were following her account.

Twitter may be considered an for digital street performers. As we continue to see, online crowds hold much more power to engage with those stationed outside the online Quincy Market.

Photo by Ecnerwal.

A report on Marketplace this morning actually managed to anger me. The show featured a short conversation with Bill Werde of Billboard Magazine about the recent release of Ghosts by Nine Inch Nails.

What Trent and NIN are doing is the future of music, and it’s definitely newsworthy. Unfortunately, the name of the report (“Trent Reznor pulls a Radiohead”) foreshadowed its many flaws:

1. Nine Inch Nails was giving away music long before Radiohead’s In Rainbows was released for free. In fact, NIN released a couple noteworthy radio hits under a liberal license perfect for remixers. Werde’s comments sounded as if the band was only releasing the tracks due to the success of Radiohead’s attempt.
2. Werde argues that only “bands that frankly major labels have already made big brands” profit from freely releasing music. I believe artists like Jonathan Coulton might disagree. (Notably, it may be true that bands with more tech-savvy fanbases may profit more from this tactic, but I haven’t made up my mind about that.)
3. It’s “Nine Inch Nails”, not “Nine Inch Nail’s”.

It’s great that these sorts of movements are getting mainstream publicity. I just wish they’d get the facts straight.

An audio version of the conversation is also available on the site.

Today was a big day for search.

In the early days of the Web, finding information was accomplished through human-edited directories (the most popular of which was Yahoo).  Despite the increasing complexity of sites and services available on the Web, search results have remained essentially the same since the switch to crawler-based search in the late 1990s.  Results have actually grown more standardized over the last decade; the ubiquitous search results page now features the familiar blue, gray, green color scheme we’ve seen for quite a few years.

Yahoo wants to change that.  Today the search company began to detail its new search platform, complete with microformat support and an overall attempt to jump-start the embrace of Sir Tim’s vision of a semantic Web.

Attempts at more useful results

Semantic results are the natural evolution of search.  Instead of providing a plain title/description/URL listing for pages in a result list, Yahoo hopes to open up the structure to allow site owners to have a bit of customization of how their results appear.

Experiments with results reformatting have been taking place for a while.  Google’s Sitelinks – extra links to navigation points within a site that appear below a site’s main listing – now appear frequently in results pages, and searches for local services lead off with a map-based view of business listings.  Google’s Experimental Search area has offered map, timeline, and info views for results since May of last year, but it has unfortunately stayed buried within the depths of Google Labs.

Yahoo wants to put semantic search front and center.  As Yahoo mentions in their announcement, more relevant search results benefit the search engine, the content creator, and the searcher.

Control may be the difference

Although Google has experimented with contextual views, Yahoo’s announcement takes a somewhat risky yet possibly rewarding extra step: webmaster control of results.  The Yahoo announcement gives a visual example of a LinkedIn result that features action links, network stats, and profile information.  An earlier Yelp result mockup included location and rating information of a Japanese restaurant.

It’s wonderful to see that Yahoo is pushing forward with semantic results by supporting open microformats and service-specific search results.  The icing on the cake will be the control given to webmasters to improve the usefulness of their sites’ results.

For the first time in years, we’re on the brink of a revolution in the world of online search.

While reading through my Twitterstream this afternoon, I noticed an @leolaporte invasion.  Leo had asked a question:

Getting ready to speak to radio executives at the Radio Ink conference. Q: Is radio dead? Discuss! 

Since my friends on Twitter share my love of the Laporte, I was treated to a constant barrage of replies.

In its fairly short life, Twitter has moved from not much more than a public view of status messages to a close-knit way to read and reply to whatever happens to be taking up space in the minds of your friends.  Leo’s afternoon query – and thousands of others from people all around the world – signal another space for everyone’s favorite 140-character addiction: a real-time polling service.

Advantage: popularity

The polling advantage is held by those with a huge following.  While a user with a double-digit following may receive one or two responses a Twitter question, Leo (with over 9,000 followers) will naturally receive more.

Where does that leave users with a humbler following?  In general Twitter users enjoy making connections and helping others.  The missing link is a centralized place for people to ask (and answer) questions in the Twitterverse.

A possible solution

Twitter services such as @commuter have become an innovative way to extend the possibilities of microblogging.  Could a centralized question and answer service be the answer for Twitter users who want to ask and answer questions?

Consider the following scenario.

1. A Twitter user sends a direct message (DM) to a question service/bot.
2. The service tweets the user’s question with the user’s name at the beginning of the tweet.
3. Other users reply to the question asker with their answer.

A very similar service already exists; @QNA takes a more reference-based approach.  The social component of Twitter seems to be missing, though.  Any sort of conversational question could be useful: What should I watch on TV right now? Anyone know how to change roles in WordPress? Where should I go for the best cheese steaks in Philly?

The biggest challenge of such a service would be convincing enough users to adopt it.

In his wonderful “Social Media & Networking Starter Guide” presentation at PodCamp Toronto, Chris Brogan (another member of the Twitter four-digit follower club) explained how his connections on Twitter helped him find his destination while he was lost in Manhattan.   How long will it take before any Twitter user can have that sort of convenience?